Video

Michael Pollan | One Writer's Trip

As part of the 2015–2016 Fellows’ Presentation Series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Michael Pollan RI ’16, the Suzanne Young Murray Fellow, delivered an autobiographical talk—"One Writer’s Trip”—about his thinking and writing on nature as we find it closer to home: the garden, the farm, the table, and most recently, the altered states of consciousness that certain plants and fungi allow us to achieve. These excerpts are from that talk.

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Radcliffe fellow Michael Pollan is exploring a budding rebirth of psychedelic drugs, all but banned since the 1960s. “This has been a different kind of reporting for me. Interviewing people with cancer diagnoses—who are thinking about death—and talking about death with them,” Pollan said.

Michael Pollan RI '16, the acclaimed food journalist, is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute exploring psychedelic drug therapy. He talked with the Harvard Crimson about healthy eating hacks in college and his fellowship year so far.

“I was born with this idea that I wanted to be an artist, because I wanted to understand what it means to be a human,” says Karole Armitage RI '16. “What it means to be alive.” She chose to write on the air with her body—and this is how she comes to know her place in the world.

Peter Behrens with his wife, Basha Burwell, and their son, Henry Behrens. Photo by Jason Grow

In his three novels and two collections of short stories, Peter Behrens RI ’16 plumbs his family’s history in Canada, England, Germany, and Ireland. What drives him, however, is not what he knows about his family but what he doesn’t know: “The only way I know to learn what I don’t know is through fiction.”